Valerie Ramseyer is an associate professor in the History Department. Her area of expertise is the history of the Mediterranean in the early Middle Ages (c. 600-1100). She recently published a book with Cornell University Press, The Remaking of a Religious Landscape: Medieval Southern Italy, 850-1150 and is currently working on a new book project, Lombards and Greeks, Arabs and Normans: Southern Italy in the Early Middle Ages. She teaches a variety of courses focusing on the history of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean between the years 300 and 1300.
Gurminder Bhogal's research and teaching interests focus on the idea of ornament in musical composition,
criticism, and aesthetics. Her dissertation examined Ravel's use of the arabesque as a
rhythmic/metric and symbolic gesture, while her recent work explores the expressive role of
ornament in various contexts: the representation of exotic women in opera; performance;
and twentieth-century primitivism. Two articles, "Debussy's Arabesque in Ravel's Daphnis
et Chloe" and "Bejewelled Divinity and Exotic Fantasy in Delibes's Lakme," are forthcoming.
In addition, she teaches the History of Western Music sequence for majors.
Margaret Carroll teaches Art History 218 (From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Painting in the Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries) and varying seminars on late medieval and early modern art in northern Europe. A graduate of Barnard College, she received her Ph.D. from Harvard. Her book, Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens, and their Contemporaries, will be published by Penn State Press in the fall of 2007. She is currently working on a study of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.
Claire Fontijn specializes in music of the early modern period. While her
research focuses on 17th-century France and Italy, she offers courses that deal
specifically with the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In Spring 2008, she will collaborate
with Professor Sharon Elkins for the third time on an interdisciplinary course: Hildegard of
Bingen (MUS 224/REL 224). In Spring 2007, she will begin her course on Music,
Gender, and Sexuality (MUS 222/322) with a section about Hildegard of Bingen. Also in
Spring 2007, she will teach a module on Treasures of Seicento Venice (MUS
300C).
Ryan Frace is an assistant professor in the history department, with a specialization in early modern Britain and Europe. He earned his Ph.D. at the
University of Chicago, where he taught courses on early modern and modern Europe as well as colonial
America. He also spent five summers teaching Comparative Modern Revolutions at Johns
Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth (CTY). At Wellesley College he teaches courses on western Europe between 1300 and 1900. He is currently working on a book project based on his dissertation entitled "The Foundations of Enlightenment and the Advent of Modernity: Religious Transformations in Early Modern Scotland."
Evelina Guzauskyte is an assistant professor in the Spanish Department, specializing in colonial Latin American literature. She received her B.A. from Middlebury College and her Ph.D. from Columbia. Her research interests include colonial Latin American literature, travel and exploration literature, and transatlantic studies. At Wellesley College, she has taught various courses including The Clothed and the Naked in Colonial Latin America (SPAN 307), Latin American Culture and Civilization (SPAN 273), Intersecting Currents: Afro-Hispanic and Indigenous Writers in Latin American Literature (SPAN 271), Oral and Written Communication (SPAN 241) and Intermediate Spanish (201 and 202). She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled The Places of Places: Naming and Ordering the World in Christopher Columbus’s Diario de a bordo.
Rachel Jacoff teaches Dante and a variety of courses on medieval literature, including Medieval Women Writers. She has written widely on Dante, and most recently edited the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Her current work explores the relationship between Dante's Comedy and the visual arts of his time.
Yu Jin Ko received a B.A. from Columbia University, an M.A. from Cambridge
University (Clare College), and a Ph.D. from Yale University. Since his arrival
at the College in 1995, he has taught a variety of courses, ranging from a writing
course for first-years and a literature course studying race, class and gender.
However, his specialty remains Shakespeare, with a particular focus on performance.
His publications have been centered on Shakespeare. His first book,
Mutability and Division on Shakespeare's Stage, appeared in 2004. His articles and
reviews since then have focused even more on Shakespeare in performance, both in the
theatre and on film. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Shakespeare
in America.
Barry Lydgate is professor of French and teaches a seminar on Renaissance literature and culture (French 301, Books and Voices in Renaissance France) as well as courses on post-Liberation Paris, confession and autobiography, and beginning French language and culture. He has written on Rabelais, Montaigne, and the genesis of the novel and of literary self-portraiture in the French Renaissance. His research interests include the literary consequences of the advent of printing and Paris in the 1940s and 50s. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale. He is co-author of French in Action, the multimedia course produced by Yale, Wellesley and WGBH-TV Boston.
Kathryn Lynch teaches all things medieval in the Wellesley English Department,
from Beowulf to the late medieval English dream vision. Her research
specialty is Chaucer. She is the author of The High Medieval Dream Vision:
Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form (Stanford, 1988) and Chaucer's
Philosophical Visions (Brewer, 2000), and the editor of a collection of essays, Chaucer's Cultural Geography (Routledge, 2002) and a Norton Critical
Edition of Chaucer dream visions and shorter poems (2006).
Sergio Parussa is assistant professor of Italian Studies at Wellesley College. He has published a book and several articles on Italian literature and a translation of a novel by Ginevra Bompiani (The Great Bear. New York: Italica Press. November 2000). He teaches two 300-level courses on the Italian Renaissance: a survey course on the role of the court in the shaping of Italian cultural and political life (ITAS 312, Rinascimento e Rinascimenti: Cultural Identities in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Italy) and an advanced seminar on Renaissance theatre as the mirror of a complex and dynamic relationship between power and culture (ITAS 311, Theatre, Politics, and the Arts in Renaissance Italy). His current research focuses on Jewish Italian literature.
Lara Tohme is the Knafel Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Art Department and co-Director of the Architecture Program. She teaches Islamic, Byzantine, and European medieval art and architecture. She received a B.A. in Art History from the University of Washington, an M.A. in Art History from the University of Oregon, and a Ph.D. in the History of Architecture: Theory and Criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests include early and medieval Islamic art and architecture, Mediterranean art and architecture from the 5th through the 14th centuries C.E., and cross-cultural interactions in the Medieval Mediterranean.
